


I see things

by Yesthatsmynaturalcolour



Series: Bad news from the zones [2]
Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: Drugs, M/M, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, References to Drugs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 11:57:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,402
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4478504
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Yesthatsmynaturalcolour/pseuds/Yesthatsmynaturalcolour
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He remembers laughter, and looking next to him, looking at Link and shaking his head. He doesn’t remember much outside that, topics come to his head in the middle of the night lying next to the other he remembers. Day comes and it all washes away like it was never real. </p>
<p>Of living in Battery City, and leaving it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I see things

He only vaguely remembers the things they use to talk about. The web show that started while they were in school, a joke between friends that gained popularity and was a lot of people’s escape during the start of the war. They weren’t news, they didn’t cover the news. They covered dumb stuff like how many marshmallows on record someone put in their mouth, what foods tasted good with milk. It didn’t become news until the war, until the explosions and death forced them into the only surviving city around. 

He remembers laughter, and looking next to him, looking at Link and shaking his head. He doesn’t remember much outside that, topics come to his head in the middle of the night lying next to the other he remembers. Day comes and it all washes away like it was never real. BL/Ind gives him bottles of pills and he rolls it between his hands smiling and nodding. Taking them and not taking them at the same time. Learning slowly from years of avoiding vitamins with his Mom, Link takes them. Link swallows the colorful misshapen pills and smiles everyday. Smiles and laughs like nothings wrong, even if he turns his head to look at Rhett with confusion in his eyes sometimes. Like he doesn’t know who he’s looking at for the first time in ten years. They stop sharing a bed and Rhett takes it, because Link smiles and makes breakfast every morning. He reads the news with confidence. Believes in the words tumbling out of his mouth because the pills don’t let anyone believe otherwise.

They report about everything being wonderful, the great weather, the drones spying on them, the murders, how great BL/Ind is. How they saved everyone and to constantly give them the full trust, they do adjustment monitors and advertisements for the medication. He swallows all his jokes, anything that could give away that he’s not taking his pills. He consumes the news, the information around him telling him that while they cheerful declare BL/Ind the best company in the entire zone area….it’s not. It’s so not. 

He reads a illegal paper that could end up getting him killed. News in the Zones, about these people called the Killjoys, rebelling against BL/Ind. Reads about the murders, the people dying, the people looking for nothing but a can of food and being gunned down. He reads about the Killjoys saving people, about them running and being wanted. Posters appear throughout the city. White and huge red X’s through the faces of four men. He feels like he’s seen one of them in passing, maybe they lived in the city, made he had. All he knows now is there doing something good. He listens to a shit radio he bought in a back alley on as low as he can get it in the middle of the night knowing if anything anyone finds out, he’s dead and the risk just seems worth it. He listens to stories from the Zone’s unfiltered. Listens to a gruff man play music he’s never heard, listens to him laugh endlessly about four killjoys. The ones on the posters he’s pretty sure. He consumes everything and anything he can get his hands on without dying. 

He reports the news handed to him on a sleek white piece of paper, and sits in the dark and finds out the truths. It doesn’t take long of doing both to question why he’s doing one, why he’s still in this horrible city. Where people are murdered for teaching kids the piano. He watches Link in the mornings, watches someone who was once his best friend laughing and experiencing everything with him and knows he can’t even remember the last time they talked. Link just stands staring out the window at the brick wall across from the apartment. The taller sets his mug down, looking at the murky liquid, and makes his choice without another thought. It’s not hard to find what he needed, and Link has no reason not to trust him. He switches the pills out, all of them. The ones at work, the ones at the house, the ones in the car. It takes all the money he has and he has to do it as slowly as he can take to avoid BL inquiring about his spending. He wonders for a minute watching Link a few days later.

Wonders if he’s ready to see the world for what it really is. For him to learn what Rhett’s done his best to keep from him, and maybe he never should of, maybe he should of done this sooner, done something sooner. Told Link before not to take the pills, told him what they did. He wonders now watching Link frown into the white sink, if he’ll be angry. If he’ll be mad, or maybe worse of all. If he’ll still believe in BL/Ind after all this. If he waited to long to try and get him to come back from it all. He gets his answer soon enough, as Link slowly comes back to what he once was. Starts getting after Rhett for putting his mug in the sink and not cleaning it. Starts laughing at jokes, and his eyebrows furrowing when they read the news. 

Rhett waits, gives it a week before he tells Link everything in the middle of the night, curled up in the others bed with him. Which he first questions when they stopped sleeping in the same bed. Rhett tells him about the pills, about the murders, about BL and what it really is. He tells him the dangers to, about coming clean, about how if they find out he’s off his meds they’ll take him away to either kill him or force him to compliance. He tells him everything he can remember, anything he can think of, and lets Link ask all the questions. Then he gives him his space. Slipping away out of nerves. Afraid that Link could pick one of the many choices he’d been worrying about.

He is mad, which is to be expected. He’s mad Rhett left him in the dark. He’s mainly mad the other suffered in silence while Link believed in everything the drugs made him believe in. That Rhett had to watch him become an entirely different person. He’s mad he was living in a city that did all these things. So he finds the other the next night of safety. Climbs into the bed and whispers to him.

“I want to leave…” He mumbles and Rhett turns, looking at him in confusion. “I want to leave the city….I don’t want to live here anymore.” The taller nodds.

“Okay...okay. If that’s what you want.” Rhett mumbles, and Link shakes his head.

“You want this to right? To leave?” Because if they're just doing it for him, Rhett’s sacrificed enough, but Rhett nods, he nods and presses a soft kiss to the others head and that’s that. 

They don’t flee the city, they opt instead to just move to a neutral zone. It means somewhat good terms with BL, somewhat being the key word. There’s an edge to it, a hidden meaning to the words that tells them both they can be killed any moment. So they begin slowly inching out of it to the edge of no where to a city far into a zone not patrolled by the city. They open a shop, the local shop keep having just passed away. Something tells them he was killed but that’s not their concern right now. A shop sounds like something safe, to buy stuff from BL and sell it for slightly less to people who aren’t allowed in the neutral zones. Buy stuff from around collecting everything and selling it to those who need it. The shop that once was is nothing but rubble and dust now so they search for something new. They find a studio, and Rhett fiddles with the dusty equipment as they decide yeah. Yeah this is home, and this is what they were looking for. He remembers a lot more of the before these days, he knows what these were used for. The feel of them and what they reported on the day they got that new mic, and he smiles hanging the mics on the wall of the store.


End file.
